I, like everyone else I know, am addicted to my phone. How could I not be? — I grew up on the internet. My pre-teen years were defined by Snapchat, YouTube, Musical.ly and Vine (RIP to the latter two, TikTok is nothing in comparison). I had an iPhone before I got my driver’s licence, I had an iPad before I got my period. We were all still figuring the digital world out, dealing with new forms of connection and community building, and I associate that era with childhood nostalgia. The Instagram logo was an old-timey camera, phones had a headphone jack, and life was so good. Fast-forward to now — a Snapchat notification sends a shiver down my spine. Hearing my phone buzz triggers a switch in my brain where I have to give it attention immediately or it’ll be playing on my mind until I do. I spend more time on my phone than I spend doing literally anything else. We, my phone and I, have been in a toxic long-term relationship since the day we met all those years ago.
I’ve heard about the idea that most relationships end because of the 65% rule: a build-up of feelings, unseen, emotionally drained, and generally unhappy, more than 65% of the time. It’s a relatively social rule, backed up loosely by one study (Bühler & Orth, 2024), but it’s helpful to describe how I felt when I started the long, tumultuous process of breaking up with my phone. I spent eight to nine hours on my phone everyday and maybe one or two of those hours were either productive, social, or contributed to my happiness; the rest was numbing, mindless scrolling. So, in the hopes that it could help someone else, here’s everything I have done so far that helped me reduce my screen time and take control of my own life again.
The Breaking Point
In January, I was scrolling Twitter (of course, I was) and I came across this tweet from the user @yungkitty404:
“As somebody who has gone back and forth with this, you really only need
like two weeks replacing screen time with reading to get your attention span
back. You’re not permanently fucked, and resetting is easier than you think.
Put down your phone and pick up a book.”
This felt like a movie scene where the character suddenly becomes self-aware of the world around them, like on The Truman Show when the studio light falls from the sky. Realistically, I knew Twitter user @yungkitty404 likely had no real credibility on the subject. Everyone on Twitter acts like they’re an expert in everything when they really have no more credentials than I do, but it struck a chord anyway. Maybe I really am not permanently fucked.
I picked up a book from my bookshelf and sat on the couch to read. Within five minutes, I had stopped reading to pick up my phone five times. Frustrated, I put my phone on the dining table, far enough away from me so I would have to physically get up to grab it. I read for another ten minutes, and I kept pausing and reaching for my phone like a phantom limb. It was a humiliation ritual, really. I couldn’t read —something I had loved to do since I was a child— without having my phone next to me. That was the realization I needed to make a serious change. My dad would’ve called it the “TSN turning point” (basically the moment where the game changes), and in a way, it was similar to a long field goal in the last two minutes of a football game. The Chicago Bears, like me, would have a long way to go and a lot of trades to make if they want to be anywhere near the end goal.
Phase one
The breakup started as most do, with denial. Naively, I thought recognizing that I was spending too much time on my phone was the most important piece of the puzzle. It should be a relatively quick fix from there, or so I thought. I started with the built-in features that your phone gives you to limit your usage of your phone (which is so interesting in and of itself), with screen limits and Apple’s “downtime” function. This works by having the user select a maximum number of hours for phone use, and once you reach that amount of time, you’ll get a message that says “You’ve reached your limit,” which prevents you from entering any app. Unceremoniously, I would just hit the little button that gives you fifteen more minutes whenever I wanted to browse an app.
I tried another app called Opal, which shows you a message like “At this rate, you’ll be spending x amount of years on your phone. Do something else instead”, each time you try to enter an app that you selected as a “distraction”. This was even more jarring than screen limits, but I’d still click past every warning; I just felt much more guilty about it than before. I also tried the method of turning your phone’s graphics into a gray scale, but this just depressed me more than anything. I was on my phone for the same amount of time, just deprived of the joys of technicolour. This was going to be much harder than that inspirational tweet made it seem.
Screen time limits were a no for me. I don’t like being told what to do in any aspect of my life, so screen limits sometimes made me want to be on my phone more, just so I would be making my own choice instead of doing what I was told. I might’ve wanted to make a change, but I couldn’t contradict my own personality to do that.
My new approach, after the complete failure of screen-limiting features, was to read in bed at night and plug my phone in outside of my bedroom. For a few days, this was actually so lovely. When it was time to go to bed, I would do some routine checks of my social media, then plug it in out in the living room. When I woke up ,I couldn’t spend time idling on my phone before getting out of bed, which was an added plus. My nighttime routine was completely free of the pesky phone addiction!
This probably lasted a week, before I had a terrible nightmare about my family not being able to reach me in an emergency late at night because my phone was in the living room, which was followed by a SECOND nightmare about not being able to call 911 when someone broke into my house because I didn’t have my phone. Yes, anxiety does run in my family. No, I did not leave my phone outside my room after that night.
So, that was phase one. I felt discouraged, but I am the most stubborn person I know and was determined to spend less time on my phone; I just knew it wasn’t going to be easy. In hindsight, hard quitting was never going to work for me. I couldn’t force or guilt myself out of an addiction. Erasing access to my phone by blocking apps or turning it off was never the goal; the goal was to erase the need to be on it twenty-four seven and the subconscious choice to scroll. It’s a mindset problem, not an access problem, so there was no way to combat it with the settings on my phone. I had to reconsider why I actually wanted to do this. Going into phase two, I would have to begin the daunting task of reevaluating what parts of my phone made me happy, and what parts made up the 65% (I estimate closer to 80%) that drained me.
phase two
Thus began the drafting process. Mail, Facebook, and Pinterest, I could move to my laptop only. I deleted every game and all streaming services that I could watch on my TV instead. I knew from the beginning that there were some things that really did make me happy about my phone and about social media. FaceTime, Messages, Phone, Photos, Music, and Podcasts never left me in a scrolling frenzy where I didn’t know how much time had passed since I’d opened the app; they made my day better. Another thing I considered is that I love posting online. I’m an internet oversharer at heart, and I love connecting with my friends through a post. Besides posting on my private story, I was so beyond Snapchat. I only ever used the “chat” feature, and I still stand by the fact that Snapchat is for high schoolers,s and it was time to move on anyway. Despite this, my girls group chat (yes, THE girls group chat) is on Snapchat, and all my photos from 2016-2022 lived in the app’s “memories”, so I couldn’t delete it altogether. I ended up making a special request to any of my friends who still used Snapchat as their primary communication app to contact me at my phone number instead of through Snapchat, and I turned off my Snapchat notifications. I check the group chat periodically, but they know it’ll be one to two business days until I respond there, so they will reluctantly text or call my phone if they need me. As for posting stories, I moved to posting Instagram stories more regularly instead and creating a “close friends” story instead of my Snapchat private story. Instagram has never been a problem app for me, so I made that my primary form of social media posting; still turning off the notifications so it wasn’t constantly at the forefront of my mind.
Then came my two biggest problem areas: Twitter and TikTok. Twitter sensationalizes news to an insane degree, and it can be very hard to open the app and see so much content that’s upsetting and overwhelming. I used to spiral out of control from doomscrolling on Twitter and not being able to absorb everything. The balance between keeping up with current events and staying emotionally sane is still one I’m learning. I began to practice the following: when I see a complex and distressing tweet, I get off the app and sit with it. I don’t get back on there until I feel alright about seeing something else that could potentially be upsetting. I can engage with news media and form opinions on my own, and the hellscape that is Twitter discourse was completely unnecessary for me to draw my own conclusions from the media I consumed. I did get all my Taylor Swift updates from there —I’ll pause here for you to roll your eyes— so I ended up downloading a new app that was strictly for Taylor Swift updates (I use Swift Alert) and silencing all Twitter notifications. When I do feel like perusing Twitter, I let myself do it, then I consciously choose to turn it off when I see something I should be processing on my own time without an influx of unintelligible comments clouding my thoughts.
Then comes TikTok. I would be hours into scrolling and then start to think, I am not at all engaged in what I’m seeing. I could not tell you what the last video I watched was about, or how much time it had been since I first opened the app. TikTok was the ultimate time-suck for me, and I swear I could feel the instant a ten-second video started eating away at my brain’s critical thinking skills. This is one of the apps I deleted for a long time. I still delete it from time to time just to take breaks from it, and this is the one app I’ve benefited from a screen limit for. I set a fifteen-minute screen limit for TikTok because it’s the easiest to get lost in for extended periods of time. When the time limit screen appears, I’m grateful for the reminder of how much time I’ve spent, instead of being angry with it.
With the main perpetrators of my mental health named, sorted, and deleted, I was given a foundation to build a life of less screen time upon. After changing my habits, I had to switch my mindset. The fundamental idea that guided me throughout this process was to consume one piece of media at a time and to sit with that media after consuming it. This was the polar opposite of my regular consumption, which consisted of watching TikToks with the TV auto-playing episodes until, inevitably, I got overwhelmed and overstimulated. The new method created room for thoughts to exist instead of being diluted. For example, if I were watching TV, I wouldn’t be on my phone at the same time. I kept a little phone stand next to my TV remote, so I would associate putting one down to pick up the other. I stopped using music as background noise, and instead, if I wanted to listen to music, that would be my one media, and all other screens would be off. I’m a crafter, so this gave me much more of an opportunity to turn on my record player and do a craft on my dining room table instead of scrolling. It was a double-positive, because I got to appreciate the music more and do something productive at the same time. Channelling my energy into something creative not only made me feel better, but substituted something that drained me for something that relaxed me.
I also tried to make it a practice to sit with the media I consumed instead of moving on to the next thing as soon as possible. I rate every movie on Letterboxd (which, yes, is an app on your phone. You win some, you lose some.), I keep a book reviewing journal, and I turned off autoplay for my TV shows. By doing this, I found a huge difference in the speed at which I absorb content as well as how much I crave more content. Coincidentally, or perhaps in part because of this practice, I now watch more movies and long-form content. Before, the commitment to watching a full movie seemed so daunting, and I was always reluctant to do so, even if I spent the equivalent of a movie’s runtime on TikTok.
The last thing I tried to do in this phase was call and FaceTime more than text. If I’m waiting for a text back, I’m probably going to scroll on my phone in the meantime, and the scrolling cycle would continue as the conversation would. I love to call and FaceTime anyway, so this was a relatively easy switch for me, and a minor inconvenience for some of my friends who get the same chills from an incoming phone call that I get from a Snapchat notification. These changes are what, over the span of two-ish months, cut my screen time in half, from eight hours to four hours. It wasn’t my end goal, but it was a lot of progress compared to the first attempt.
Phase three / results
So, how do I feel now? Better. I still have days where I get glued to my phone for longer than I want to be, but generally, I really feel like I live my life differently. The benefits from my newfound phonelessness are pretty much endless.
I have the absolute worst short-term memory (names and memories go in one ear and out the other), and I really feel that my memory has gotten better from avoiding social media and my phone. I get way more done, and I feel like I have more time in a day. I get fewer headaches, which used to plague my existence. I sleep earlier and better, and my Fitbit has been telling me I’ve been getting more REM and deep sleep (I don’t know what this means, I just know I wasn’t getting enough of it before). Because I had so much more time, I picked up hobbies much more easily, including reading and exercising more. I am just happier, less irritable, and I find it easier to reframe my thinking as positive, even in negative situations. Processing your emotions is so much easier when you don’t have a screen yelling at you with 597281 different voices telling you how you should be feeling.
The greatest thing I have reclaimed from my time away from my phone is, as the tweet foreshadowed, my attention span. I can sit in a lecture and focus on the material for an entire hour, take notes, attentively listen, and engage in a classroom setting. Before this, I used to pick up my phone ten to twelve times during a lecture. Now, I keep it in my bag for the whole class. I can read for an hour and be invested in a book like I was when I was a kid. I can listen to my friends talk for as long as they want, and I don’t get distracted by a notification or a routine phone check.
As of recently, I have still been making tweaks. I started putting my phone on my dresser instead of my nightstand, so it’s out of reach of my bed but doesn’t give me bone-chilling nightmares. When I’m out, I put my phone in my purse instead of in my pocket. I bought an alarm clock instead of using my phone for an alarm. I bring my digital camera to every event and again, keep my phone in my purse. My screen time has been at an average of two to three hours for the last few months, and although I’d still like to bring it down, I am so happy with the progress I’ve made in all areas of my life. I’m a better friend, family member, student, and person without my phone addiction; even if my friends complain about my response time, and my mom thinks I still don’t call her enough.
If you’re feeling drained, frustrated, and all around bad most of the time, you might be heading towards an inevitable breakup. Like a messy situationship, I still get caught up sometimes, tempted by the endlessness of an indigestible amount of content, but I know the feeling won’t last. So, if it’s not your boyfriend that’s the problem (you should try breaking up with that one first), unfortunately —and I hate to admit it— it really is that damn phone.
work cited
Bühler, J. L., & Orth, U. (2024). How relationship satisfaction changes within and
across romantic relationships: Evidence from a large longitudinal study.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126(5), 930–945.
https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000492.
The Truman Show. Directed by Peter Weir, Paramount Pictures, 1998.
List of Online Creators that helped me with My Journey
Youtube:
Anna Howard
Ashy
Eddy Burback
https://youtu.be/nnsyGSTKlw0?si=ybBshpETWVG7zrAq (If you only watch one of these, make it this video. This video changed my life.)
Keltie O’Connor
Makari Espe
Podcasts:
Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain
- “Put Your Phone Down.”
- ” Things To Do Instead of Doom-scrolling This Summer”
- ” The Struggle to Find a Hobby”
A Really Good Cry with Radhi Devlukia
- ” Are You Filling Every Moment with Screen Time? How Phone Addiction is Affecting Your Relationships.”
The Psychology of Your 20s with Jemma Sbeg
- ” 320. Should I break up with my phone?”
- ” My Phone is Destroying My Life”